Not sure anyone buying a base model Apple is "price conscious" but maybe "brand conscious"?
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The White Unibody MacBook has same storage as M4 Air
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Not sure anyone buying a base model Apple is "price conscious" but maybe "brand conscious"?
As some one who owns a M4 max 128 GB 4 TB MBP for professional use, I also own a MBA M2 base model. My spouse and kids wanted cheapest mac to share, and they use it for generic school work. A general consumer isn’t spec shopping and crunching numbers on component costs.Not sure anyone buying a base model Apple is "price conscious" but maybe "brand conscious"?
No, they are not comparable. Sorry you seemingly fail to grasp the changes that have happened. Read up on Apple's Unified Memory Architecture (UMA), among other things (primarily i/o).
We now compute differently. Sure there are still ones and zeros, mass storage still exists, etc. But tech changes have changed how (thinking) users optimize all those things.
E.g. RAM has always been important but under UMA it is even more important (and look at the huge jumps Apple has made in available RAM for compute-optimizing users); file sizes (mostly imagery) are much larger than 2009; memory bandwidth; i/o transfer rates are hugely different, as is the Mac OS. And we have the cloud...
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The 2009 MB started at $999 in 2009 dollars, was plastic and was big enough to use a large chunky HDD. This would be $1500 inflation adjusted btw
The 2009 Macbook Air started at $1499 with a 120gb hard drive, and is more comparable in terms of build quality and form factor. This would be $2250 inflation adjusted (per bls.gov)
The Air is a great deal compared to then, just pay to upgrade the storage
The real problem, for my generation especially, is that wages haven’t kept up with inflation, most people wouldn’t be complaining about that $200 for more storage if they had. To keep the cost down to a level people can afford at baseline they have to make some sacrifices. It’s a miracle the $999 MBA exists at all in 2025
The 2009 Macbook Air started at $1499 with a 120gb hard drive, and is more comparable in terms of build quality and form factor. This would be $2250 inflation adjusted (per bls.gov)
The Air is a great deal compared to then, just pay to upgrade the storage
The real problem, for my generation especially, is that wages haven’t kept up with inflation, most people wouldn’t be complaining about that $200 for more storage if they had. To keep the cost down to a level people can afford at baseline they have to make some sacrifices. It’s a miracle the $999 MBA exists at all in 2025
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You are spot on, it is an entirely different technology. But it is SSD that is the cheaper storage tech, even compared to 2009 HDDs.
The HDD upgrade back than was 4x more expensive than the SSD upgrade is today.
Note that the y-Axis here is logarithmic.
Im not mad that Apple decides to sell base models with very limited storage. I would even cool if Apple decides that the base storage should be 125GB, because someones mom isnt even using that amount.
But of course an upgrade shouldnt cost more than 150$ per TB.
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Has anyone considered that the average storage needs of regular people have gone down as everything has gone streaming?
Of course, we are on Mac Rumors, where people here talk about storage nonstop and servers and NAS and massive libraries of content… But that’s not your average person.
In 2009 with that 250 GB hard drive, your average person was probably storing their entire iTunes library, their iPhone applications, their Mac applications, any movies or TV shows they had downloaded, and their entire photo/home video libraries.
Your average person… Isn’t doing any of this anymore.
Their music library is just being streamed from Spotify or Apple Music, their photos library is somewhere in the cloud and or just uploaded all to social media, their movies and TV shows are just being watched off of Netflix or any streaming service, iPhone applications literally cannot be stored on a Mac anymore.
Even the desktop and documents folder immediately goes to iCloud by default these days.
macOS takes up about 20 GB with a fresh install.
256 GB, while certainly not being a lot, is plenty for tons and tons of people.
My iPhone is 256 GB, and I still have 151 GB available.
Of course, we are on Mac Rumors, where people here talk about storage nonstop and servers and NAS and massive libraries of content… But that’s not your average person.
In 2009 with that 250 GB hard drive, your average person was probably storing their entire iTunes library, their iPhone applications, their Mac applications, any movies or TV shows they had downloaded, and their entire photo/home video libraries.
Your average person… Isn’t doing any of this anymore.
Their music library is just being streamed from Spotify or Apple Music, their photos library is somewhere in the cloud and or just uploaded all to social media, their movies and TV shows are just being watched off of Netflix or any streaming service, iPhone applications literally cannot be stored on a Mac anymore.
Even the desktop and documents folder immediately goes to iCloud by default these days.
macOS takes up about 20 GB with a fresh install.
256 GB, while certainly not being a lot, is plenty for tons and tons of people.
My iPhone is 256 GB, and I still have 151 GB available.
It’s been an Apple strategy to subsidize base models for about 15 years now and keep entry price at 999 for their base laptops. 2010 MBA with 128 GB SSD used to cost 1500-1600. Apple introduced 64 GB base model MBA 11 inch for 999 in 2011. When Apple discontinued base MBA11, they kept the MBA13 base model 128 GB at 999.
The upgrade costs aren’t based on what the storage itself costs, it’s just made up price laddering to get their average margins per unit where they need to be.
The base model is subsidized by those who upgrade and is artificially made cheaper, I’d assume they’re not getting the margins they’re after on the base model of most of their products
Whoops I just repeated what you said essentially, sorry ha
Do you think people who play 70GB games are buying low-end Macbook Airs or Pros to do that on?
Clearly Tim Apple is responsible for this. If Steve Jobs was still CEO the Air would support a dozen external displays!My Mac IIci supports 4 displays, while my brand new M4 Air only supports 3. WTF is Apple thinking????
It’s beating a dead horse at this point. The same base model conversation has Been going on for past decade or so, and will keep going.
Why is it an issue that the scree is almost the same size? Should it be getting smaller? Or larger? And why?
Of course it isn’t apples to apples.
Comparing a 2009 MacBook Air to a 2025 MacBook Air, practically everything is different. The screen resolution is higher, peak brightness is higher, base RAM is massively increased, the processor architecture has changed, performance has increased, performance per watt has increased, the USB standard is much more capable and on and on.
The two things that haven’t changed are the price (although taking inflation into account it has actually gone down quite a bit) and base storage.
The price per GB for SSD storage now is significantly lower than the price per GB for spinning platters in 2009, which should really be the only metric that matters in this context.
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Yeah. Apple is really disgraceful with storage capacity these days. It wouldn't bother me as much if we could switch out the hard drives ourselves on these newer models.
The bigger insult is Xcode and some other apple apps end up consuming like 150 gb worth of data if you spit in its general direction. Its nearly impossible for a new dev or anything to work on 256 gb which sucks for getting new people who want to dip their toes in macOS.
Can't those people buy a model with more storage? Every time I've wanted to buy a Macbook there have been additional storage tiers available. It's never been limited to 256GB.
I think what you're saying is that Apple should protect those people from not knowing what to buy?
Wrong. Not SJ nor any other competent CEO would have Apple's lowest end laptop supporting lots of displays.
Don't listen to clueless iSheeps here telling you 256GB is enough or to spend $200 for 256GB SSD upgrade, buy a 4TB T5 Evo SSD from Samsung for the same price, or T7 if you need faster storage but it's slightly more expensive.
SSD on MBA is not even fast, 1TB 990 Pro on PC costs like $100 and it's 3 times faster.
SSD on MBA is not even fast, 1TB 990 Pro on PC costs like $100 and it's 3 times faster.
I was trying to be funny, but I guess with all the things people say it’s hard to tell a joke from something serious
Are a lot of programmers buying the lowest end Macbook Airs?
You have to ask yourself, even though it was 250GB HDD back in 2009, would you even be able to use that 5400 rpm 2.5" drive today without pulling your hair out on any file bigger then 1GB? It comes down to cost of components. Apple held similar profit margins then as it does now. 2009 is pre streaming video and music. And pre cloud storage and Thunderbolt/usbc speed externals.
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